Re: Three wishes of a wannabe developer
Bon dia, Rui (my wife is Brazillian) That is t he case of economics. In the logic of freesoftware I want make programs to fill that vacuum. Well, some of it. What I want to do are economic model ba sed simulators. I could do it in a spreadsheet, but I would rather make a n ice application and make it available for everyone. For that, both competen cies in the economics and computing areas are necessary. I'd suggest looking into a real object oriented language, rather than a systems programming language like C, or a glue language like Perl. I personally think Smalltalk is a great language for beginners, particularly the Squeak version, which is available for free for most platforms. Several reasons: - you will learn good habits - you will, by necessity, learn and object oriented approach - Squeak is a great learning tool, with excellent debugging tools - there are some great tutorials and tutorial-like Squeak books - there are dozens of general Smalltalk books available used on Amazon, for a few bucks each. And the people who write Smalltalk books tend to be very smart guys, who will put your feet on the right path. Some are a bit dated and are too oriented towards Smalltalk platforms that no longer exist, but many of the later ones are fine for learning the concepts... I have a whole shelf of Smalltalk books that I bought for a few bucks each. - they have a very helpful mailing list for beginners - [EMAIL PROTECTED] It's a small list, very intimate, few posers, mainly people who genuinely want to help. I'd give myself a good 6 months to a year to learn the basics... you can't rush the first step. Once you get the basic idea behind objects, you might want to branch out into Ruby, another great object oriented language. All the concept you learned from Smalltalk will carry right over, and since many Ruby folk are coming from the procedural world (and really don't get objects), you will have a leg up on them. And Ruby will set you up for using Rails, which is an ideal platform for deploying web applications, which will allow you to make your economic simulations available to anyone on the net. Just my two cents. Brgds: John ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Three wishes of a wannabe developer
On Sat, Feb 09, 2008 at 11:01:53AM -0500, John Almberg wrote: Bon dia, Rui (my wife is Brazillian) That is t he case of economics. In the logic of freesoftware I want make programs to fill that vacuum. Well, some of it. What I want to do are economic model ba sed simulators. I could do it in a spreadsheet, but I would rather make a n ice application and make it available for everyone. For that, both competen cies in the economics and computing areas are necessary. I'd suggest looking into a real object oriented language, rather than a systems programming language like C, or a glue language like Perl. I personally think Smalltalk is a great language for beginners, particularly the Squeak version, which is available for free for most platforms. Several reasons: - you will learn good habits - you will, by necessity, learn and object oriented approach - Squeak is a great learning tool, with excellent debugging tools Sounds like the main arguments that used to be made for learning Pascal. Might be good, but not subscribed to by very many. jerry - there are some great tutorials and tutorial-like Squeak books - there are dozens of general Smalltalk books available used on Amazon, for a few bucks each. And the people who write Smalltalk books tend to be very smart guys, who will put your feet on the right path. Some are a bit dated and are too oriented towards Smalltalk platforms that no longer exist, but many of the later ones are fine for learning the concepts... I have a whole shelf of Smalltalk books that I bought for a few bucks each. - they have a very helpful mailing list for beginners - [EMAIL PROTECTED] It's a small list, very intimate, few posers, mainly people who genuinely want to help. I'd give myself a good 6 months to a year to learn the basics... you can't rush the first step. Once you get the basic idea behind objects, you might want to branch out into Ruby, another great object oriented language. All the concept you learned from Smalltalk will carry right over, and since many Ruby folk are coming from the procedural world (and really don't get objects), you will have a leg up on them. And Ruby will set you up for using Rails, which is an ideal platform for deploying web applications, which will allow you to make your economic simulations available to anyone on the net. Just my two cents. Brgds: John ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Three wishes of a wannabe developer
On Sat, Feb 09, 2008 at 11:01:53AM -0500, John Almberg wrote: I'd suggest looking into a real object oriented language, rather than a systems programming language like C, or a glue language like Perl. I personally think Smalltalk is a great language for beginners, particularly the Squeak version, which is available for free for most platforms. Yummy, it's a long time since I've used Smalltalk. It's still fun today, even though more from an academic point of view than real life programming. It certainly was different, compared to Common Lisp I've heavily used to hack in back then, and I kind of regret that both Smalltalk and Lisp have fallen out of favor nowadays for real projects. Once you get the basic idea behind objects, you might want to branch out into Ruby, another great object oriented language. All the concept you learned from Smalltalk will carry right over, and since many Ruby folk are coming from the procedural world (and really don't get objects), you will have a leg up on them. And Ruby will set you up for using Rails, which is an ideal platform for deploying web applications, which will allow you to make your economic simulations available to anyone on the net. Personally, I do prefer Python and I write hybrid Python/C and Python/C++ projects for a living (using SWIG and to a lesser extent Boost.Python or its frontends). For web development, which I can't avoid entirely, though I'd wish I could, I'm using Django, or some other custom mix of Python building blocks. In some rare cases, it has to be Zope-based, but this I do really positively hate! ;) Ruby and Rails are also good places to start and excellent object oriented languages. Whether you go the Python or Ruby route is really a matter of taste: both routes do have interesting things to show and are definitely worth a try (or two). Just my two cents. Brgds: John -cpghost. -- Cordula's Web. http://www.cordula.ws/ ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Three wishes of a wannabe developer
On Sat, Feb 09, 2008 at 09:12:40PM -0700, cpghost wrote: On Sat, Feb 09, 2008 at 11:01:53AM -0500, John Almberg wrote: I'd suggest looking into a real object oriented language, rather than a systems programming language like C, or a glue language like Perl. I personally think Smalltalk is a great language for beginners, particularly the Squeak version, which is available for free for most platforms. Yummy, it's a long time since I've used Smalltalk. It's still fun today, even though more from an academic point of view than real life programming. It certainly was different, compared to Common Lisp I've heavily used to hack in back then, and I kind of regret that both Smalltalk and Lisp have fallen out of favor nowadays for real projects. Once you get the basic idea behind objects, you might want to branch out into Ruby, another great object oriented language. All the concept you learned from Smalltalk will carry right over, and since many Ruby folk are coming from the procedural world (and really don't get objects), you will have a leg up on them. And Ruby will set you up for using Rails, which is an ideal platform for deploying web applications, which will allow you to make your economic simulations available to anyone on the net. Personally, I do prefer Python and I write hybrid Python/C and Python/C++ projects for a living (using SWIG and to a lesser extent Boost.Python or its frontends). For web development, which I can't avoid entirely, though I'd wish I could, I'm using Django, or some other custom mix of Python building blocks. In some rare cases, it has to be Zope-based, but this I do really positively hate! ;) Ruby and Rails are also good places to start and excellent object oriented languages. Whether you go the Python or Ruby route is really a matter of taste: both routes do have interesting things to show and are definitely worth a try (or two). Just my two cents. Brgds: John This might be off topic a bit, but personally once you wrap your head around objects and topics like polymorphism, basically you should be able to master any object-oriented language -- be it Perl or C++ or Java. If you've done C++ before, one idea you can try for an object oriented language is C#. I found C# really easy to use, being managed code and all; and the beauty of it is with the miracle of Mono you don't need to be in Windows to use it (or you can, without the use of Visual C#). I found it a great starting point, and because of C# I extended my knowledge with OOP languages and began using Perl, among other things, to do things I wouldn't normally consider with something like VB or doing C/C++. Russell Doucette. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Three wishes of a wannabe developer
On Thursday 07 February 2008 12:31:30 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: 1. I wish there were free software programming crash courses for beginners=(beginners in programming) in every free software community event and gath=eting, providing and entry route for those who want to contribute for the a=vailability of free software in all areas of thought and all ciences and al=l activities and not just be passive users. It could be just at free softwa=re events or in association with universities through summer schools, for e=xample. http://www.cs.cf.ac.uk/Dave/C/CE.html http://www.mindview.net/Books http://math.arizona.edu/~swig/documentation/pthreads/ http://www.intelligentedu.com/ Just some of my bookmarks. Also: ls -al /usr/share/doc/psd on a FreeBSD system. As for courses: http://www.oreillyschool.com/ -- Mel ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Three wishes of a wannabe developer
On Thu, Feb 07, 2008 at 11:31:30AM +, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: 1. I wish there were free software programming crash courses for beginners= (beginners in programming) in every free software community event and gath= eting, providing and entry route for those who want to contribute for the a= vailability of free software in all areas of thought and all ciences and al= l activities and not just be passive users. It could be just at free softwa= re events or in association with universities through summer schools, for e= xample. A open source website with tutorials and pointers would come in handy. This could be shared with the linux community. -- Alex Please copy the original recipients, otherwise I may not read your reply. Howtos based on my personal use, including information about setting up a firewall and creating traffic graphs with MRTG http://alex.kruijff.org/FreeBSD/ ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
